MILO'S MUSTS: Get your dose of angst in Hairstyles of the Damned’

Thursday

Aug 22, 2013 at 12:01 AMAug 22, 2013 at 10:18 PM

It may be breakfast while you’re reading this, but here’s a cocktail: Joe Meno’s “Hairstyles of the Damned” is a bit like Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” crossing Stephen Chbosky’s “Perks of Being a Wallflower” with a lime twist of early 90’s punk culture. It’s non-conformist, it’s bittersweet and it’s just plain different.

Milo Todd/medford@wickedlocal.com

It may be breakfast while you’re reading this, but here’s a cocktail: Joe Meno’s “Hairstyles of the Damned” is a bit like Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” crossing Stephen Chbosky’s “Perks of Being a Wallflower” with a lime twist of early 90’s punk culture. It’s non-conformist, it’s bittersweet and it’s just plain different.

This book is a great match for anybody who appreciates angst: people who have angst, people who used to have angst and people who like to pretend they have angst. All of the classic teen groups of the early 90’s are accounted for: punks, goths, straightedgers, nerds, jocks, overachievers, skaters, motorheads, metalheads, skinheads and those who stand on the cusp of any and all of these titles, like our protagonist, Brian.

Told from his point of view, we as readers learn something that we’ve probably since come to realize when looking back at our own high school careers: we were all as awkward as newborn giraffes.

Every last one of us.

We all did so many embarrassing things in the attempts to be cool or unique or liked and “Hairstyles of the Damned” does a great — if not painful — job at bringing this fact to life. While some of it was cringe-worthy, the truth of it at other times made it humorous.

Poor Brian is just so darn honest with his audience.

Like many books, “Hairstyles of the Damned” is ultimately a love story. Brian likes his best friend, Gretchen, a punk girl who the rest of the world teases for being fat. But she likes someone else, which would be bad enough without the moron also being a white supremacist. This clashes with Gretchen’s anti-racism, which nonetheless seems clouded over by her low self-esteem.

Gretchen spends most of her time making mixed tapes, ranting about racism and classism, creating non-violent forms of chaos, and picking fights with girls she views as prettier than her. Her mother also died in the past year, which is probably another reason why she’s on the pessimistic side of things.

Brian starts off his story realizing he likes Gretchen and spends the bulk of the book agonizing over asking her out. Being an awkward white boy — and legitimately scared of Gretchen to a certain degree — he often messes everything up by either chickening out or doing the wrong thing.

That’s the song everyone sings in this book, actually: puberty and identity-searching are horrific things, and every last character ultimately sabotages both themselves and everyone around them because of this simple fact.

Over and over and over again.

Those newborn giraffe legs are pretty darn wobbly and characters simply keep falling over. Honestly, it all made me feel better about my own high school experiences.

Taking place in south Chicago, the story also touches on racism, particularly between white and black students.

Black students are undermined when it comes to decide the senior prom’s theme song, both police and neighbors make sure black kids feel unwelcome playing on the courts of gated white communities, and one of Brian’s friends, Rod, is harassed by both black and white peers for having dark skin yet behaving in a way that’s considered too white.

While Brian is as flawed a character as any other, he has occasional moments of reflection on these issues, eventually being able to put them into terms of his own to help him see how ridiculous and wrong it all is.

Beyond that, however, nothing much happens. He recognizes it, sympathizes with it, and does nothing about it.

While his thoughts on it all are still important for naïve readers, I was disappointed that he couldn’t be more of a role model in how white people could help stop one another from acting in such ways.

Though perhaps that’s where the realism of the story comes in, however bitter. The search for identity usually hits hardest in high school, leaving most kids floundering for ways to cope with it. Some, like Brian, end up simply doing nothing, coasting from life experience to life experience in the hopes that something will eventually click.

Meno definitely seems to have been in Brian’s position at some point in his life: a confused misfit with unrequited love and a worry that his parents are on the verge of divorce. And in his teenage angst, he accurately puts down every high school identity group I mentioned earlier, usually whenever he has the opportunity. Both in high school and beyond, there’s always at least one person around to give a given group a bad name.

Meno also includes some accurate tidbits of punk culture, such as the combative differences between punks and straightedgers, a large reference to the music at the time and hair dying tips on pages 30-31.

Take it from me: those tips are 100 percent true. (I found that out the hard way, once upon a time.) Readers familiar with teenage punk culture will simply nod their heads to the accuracies, while readers who aren’t familiar will likely find the information interesting.

I’ve heard complaints in the past that this book is poorly written. Having now read it, I have to disagree. It’s actually a nicely done portrayal of an angsty high-schooler: slang, swearing, and run-on sentences. It reads very much like Brian is talking right to the reader, which I found impressive to pull off. If other readers feel that the words of teenagers are less inspiring, then that’s their business.

For you parents wondering about this book, I believe it to be one of those rare finds that stands a chance to actually engage a moody, young male who doesn’t like to read. The sex, drugs and violence are frank, but not explicit or gratuitous.

More like realistic.

The swearing is plentiful, however, and there are many homosexual slurs that are never redeemed. (That was one of the few parts of the book that didn’t sit right with me. After all of the attempts at redeeming all of the other negative behavior, these slurs were neglected.)

In short, I feel this book would be more than fine for a high-schooler.

So if you or a youngster you know has an interest in angsty teenage literature, pick up “Hairstyles of the Damned” from your local library or, as I always prefer, Bestsellers Cafe.

— Milo Todd is an employee of Bestsellers Café, 24 High St., in Medford Square. He is a Medford resident.